PayPal’s Rocky Agrawal, and other tech execs fouled by technology

PayPal exec Rakesh “Rocky” Agrawal is on the hunt for a new gig after firing off a series of typo-ridden, late-night tweets insulting colleagues. Agrawal, PayPal’s newly-hired director of strategy, tweeted that PayPal’s global communications VP was a “useless middle. manager” and a “piece of s***,” among other things. (The tweets have since been deleted, and Agrawal, for the record, says he quit before sending them out.)

Rakesh Agrawal is no longer with the company. Treat everyone with respect. No excuses. PayPal has zero tolerance. — PayPal (@PayPal) May 3, 2014

Agrawal, though, is not the only tech exec undone by technology:

– Justine Sacco, a PR director at Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp, was promptly let go after sending out this tweet before a flight from London to Cape Town, South Africa:

– In 2012 Netflix CEO Reed Hastings landed himself in hot water with the Securities and Exchange Commission over a Facebook post. Hastings’ 43-word post said subscribers had watched one billion hours of video the previous month. The SEC said the post might violate a rule requiring companies to announce material information to all investors at the same time and threatened Netflix with a civil suit.

– Google chairman Eric Schmidt closed his Instagram account in July after who Schmidt followed on the photo network became public: mainly, a lot of young women with a tendency toward bikini-clad selfies.

– Pax Dickinson, Business Insider’s former Chief Technology Officer, was fired last September after the Silicon Valley gossip rag ValleyWag pointed out that Dickinson had been tweeting sexist, racist and homophobic comments for years.

Among the tweets: “feminism in tech remains the champion topic for my block list. my finger is getting tired” and “Who has more dedication, ambition, and drive? Kobe only raped one girl, Lebron raped an entire city. +1 for Lebron.”

– Y Combinator-anointed startup founder Peter Shih attracted an army of critics after leveling his own criticisms at San Francisco on Medium in August. The rant, which ranged from PMSing women to transgender people, included this opinion on the city’s homeless population: “San Francisco has some of the craziest homeless people I have ever seen in my life. Stop giving them money, you know they just buy alcohol and drugs with it right? Next time just hand them a handle of vodka and a pack of cigarettes, it’ll save everyone some trouble.”

– Shih isn’t the only startup founder to catch heat after comments about homeless people. In December Greg Gopman, of AngelHack, posted a string of comments like this one on Facebook:

“In downtown SF the degenerates gather like hyenas, spit, urinate, taunt you, sell drugs, get rowdy, they act like they own the center of the city. Like it’s their place of leisure… In actuality it’s the business district for one of the wealthiest cities in the USA. It a disgrace. I don’t even feel safe walking down the sidewalk without planning out my walking path.”